More Election Notes

Some miscellany about the election:

• Lefty comedian Bill Maher, on his HBO show last night: “The Democrats, to a lot of Americans, have become the boutique party of fake outrage and social engineering, and they’re not entirely wrong about that.” Maher isn’t going to be invited to many college campuses any time soon. Oh, wait. . .

All of the conventional analytics right now lead you to conclude that Trump will lose. But this has been an unconventional election, so who knows. Since we in LA are celebrating the final year of Vin Scully’s remarkable radio career, I’m reminded of Scully’s spontaneous remark about Kirk Gibson’s famous home run: “In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened.” We might well be saying the same thing the night of November 8.

And we did say that. As I mentioned in my first reaction to things late Tuesday night, watching the election flip from shoo-in Hillary to OMG!! Trump might win in real time between 9 and 9:30 pm eastern time was surreal. Here’s how the NY Times odds of who would win progressed, and you can see how the lines crossed around 9:30:

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Last night in Washington DC I fell into an unexpected conversation with Chuck Todd of NBC News, and I asked him whether the networks were getting stunning but not yet definitive news from the exit poll analysts, and he said no—the exit polls were actually useless. The turning point for him was very specific: the returns from Broward County, Florida, which were supposed to come in very strong for Hillary but didn’t. When he saw that, he said, he had his first strong sense that Trump was likely to win not just Florida but the whole thing. He said it was the most extraordinary election he’d ever seen.

Trump won Wisconsin by fewer than 28,000 votes. Is it that far afield to think that Daily Show viewers there, along with the friends they might’ve shared Daily Show videos with, could’ve turned the state for the Democratic candidate? . .

Now think about how voter turnout at the polls Tuesday was incredibly low; the United States Elections Project projections show that 43.2 percent of Americans eligible to vote this year chose not to. I very strongly believe that Stewart, whose audience averaged 1.7 million viewers in 2011-2012, might’ve swayed some of the on-the-fencers to get out and make their voices heard, if only to have complaining rights in the years to come.